The mise-en-scène seemed oddly familiar. It took me a moment to work out why. Then I realised: it was from the theatre, from endless RSC and National Theatre productions of Shakespeare history plays. The kinds that have a knowing mixture of costumes from different periods: a touch of Tudor, a soupçon of Hanoverian, a dash of modern high fashion, a studied contemporary ordinariness for the proletariat hangers-on who gather outside.
But no costume department, no props store, could ever rival the accoutrements seen at the late Queen’s funeral and her lying in state. Oh, the glint of the cuirasses, the snowiness of the swans’ plumes! The pikes and swords, the halberds and bows, the epaulettes and aiguillettes! The bearskins, the ruffs, the bonnets, the croziers, the chasubles, the mitres, the cockades. The lines of men with “something like the old family coal-scuttle” on their heads, as Virginia Woolf once put it. Impossible not to speculate on details of these arcane outfits from the most lavish dressing-up boxes in the world. Take the Royal Company of Archers – a body largely elaborated by Walter Scott for George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822. How on earth do they find the eagle feathers that decorate their hats? Do they stand on the eagle-rich island of Mull, until one happens to fall out of the sky?
